Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.
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Consider in fact, a body of six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous persons, set to consult about "business," with twenty-seven millions, mostly fools, assiduously listening to them, and checking and criticising them. Was there ever, since the world began, will there ever be till the world end, any "business" accomplished in these circumstances?
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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
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The whole past is the procession of the present.
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There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
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The Highest Being reveals himself in man.
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All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.
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The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.
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No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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History is philosophy teaching by experience.
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The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.
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Endurance is patience concentrated.
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For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
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Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.
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The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers.
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The Persians are called the French of the East; we will call the Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noble people; a people of wildstrong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noblemindedness, of genius.
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Love not Pleasure; love God.
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Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
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No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something.
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A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
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Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
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All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.
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Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.